As the debt ceiling talks enter the phase where at least one side has gone to full-on chest thumping, it seems like whatever the final agreement, it will involve a Balanced Budget Amendment vote. Emily Miller makes the case that we need a BBA in order to wrestle the Federal budget into submission and I think it’s fair to say she speaks for most conservatives.
I’m not sold on the idea. Actually, I’m worse than “not sold”. I actually think a BBA hurts our fiscal position when we use it as a bargaining tool. Here’s the biggest reason why. When Republicans say they’re getting a BBA, they’re not really getting a fully-fledged amendment supported by the Democratic caucus in Congress. They’re simply getting an agreement to a vote on the amendment relatively free of political sabotage by the Democrats. Even if they got the amendment out of Congress with overwhelming Democratic support, they’d still need Democrats to prevail on their ideological brethren in state governments so that the amendment would get the majority of the vote in 38 out of 50 states.
Can you imagine that? I certainly can’t. In fact, it’s far more likely that any Balanced Budget Amendment that could pass Congress would do so with the barest minimum of Democratic support and a lot of opposition.
In short, Republicans would give up something for a chance to do something else. That’s not a good deal.
But, even if the BBA passed, I’m not all that sure it would be the wonder drug to cure our fiscal ills.
Any amendment capable of running the gauntlet of votes necessary for ratification will have to be both strong and simple. Read the other amendments. None of them are particularly complex and few of them run more than a couple of hundred words long. Those that are deal with complicated subjects like the Electoral College or the line of Presidential succession. A Balanced Budget Amendment needs to be simple but therein lies the trouble.
Let’s say we write an amendment that says, essentially, that any budget passed by Congress must be balanced. Easy enough, right? Except there are a couple of ways you can balance a budget, at least on paper. You can either make sure your spending matches your projected revenues or you can crank up revenues to match the amount of spending you want to do.
Which one do you think the Democrats, and more than a few Republics, will choose first? Which one do you think is more rife for political shenanigans?
Okay, so we’d need to write the amendment so that the method by which a budget is balanced leans toward matching expected revenues. But how, exactly, do you do that simply? Here is the text of House Joint Resolution 2, which you could consider a draft attempt at a BBA. It looks simple but when you read it a bit more closely, the loopholes become fairly obvious.
Let me point one out in the opening section:
Section 1. Total outlays for any fiscal year shall not exceed total receipts for that fiscal year, unless three-fifths of the whole number of each House of Congress shall provide by law for a specific excess of outlays over receipts by a rollcall vote.
In other words, if you can cobble together a supermajority, you can blow through this amendment like a cannonball through wet toilet paper. The Democrats managed that for a couple years not all that long ago all by themselves and even got a few controversial votes through with some Republican assistance. It wouldn’t be exceedingly difficult to step around this amendment, especially if you pepper in phrases like “the children”, “the elderly”, “the poor”, and “the districts back home”.
If you don’t think this can happen, you’ve not been paying attention to Congress the past few years. Not only have they blown through any semblance of ”balance”, they’ve stacked trillions of new debt on our children’s shoulders with barely a second thought.
But, Congress does need flexibility to fund the government in a way the public demands, but that flexibility requires an “out” clause so large in any BBA that the amendment itself can be rendered impotent. Not only does that run counter to the workings of nearly every other Amendment in the Constitution (which put strict limits on what Congress may do) but it runs counter to the purpose of having a restrictive law in the first place.
In the end, the only answer to our fiscal problems is self-control. No Balanced Budget Amendment can cure our addiction to big government. We’re going to have to do that ourselves. But if we can apply the same national will that sent a man to the moon to reining in governmental excess, we’ll achieve the same exhilarating success, and it’ll last.
When I started The Delivery almost two years ago, I confess I gave some thought to what I might do for 
